After sharpening their skills by creating animation for foreign film companies, Taiwan's animation houses are breaking out on their own.
The Golden Horse award for best animated picture has been the hardest choice for judges at Taiwan's prestigious international film festival--no such award was given in three of the last five years because the judges nominated not a single film. As for the other two years--2002 and 2004--the laurels went to Hong Kong's two McDull stories about a cute little pig, who lives the life of an average Hong Kong resident.
The second McDull story, however, was challenged by a strong hopeful, The Butterfly Lovers, based on a well-known love story about a female student dressed as a boy and her male classmate in a traditional Chinese school. Produced by the Central Motion Picture Corp., this film represented a new direction for Taiwan's largest and oldest film company, whose movies have won awards at the Berlin, Cannes and Venice film festivals.
For Taiwan's long stagnant cinema industry--only 24 feature films were produced in 2003 and 2004, and they earned less than 2 percent of total box office receipts--animation has great potential. This year, animated movies are set to continue the recent box office roll started by documentaries such as Life, about the devastating earthquake that struck Taiwan in 1999, and the musical AWayward Cloud, from acclaimed director Tsai Ming-liang . Taiwan's largest animation company, Wang Film Productions Co., released the first locally produced feature-length animated 3D film, Fire Ball, in August. The film, adapted from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, has seen its pre-sales of around NT$4 million (US$127,000) outweigh the entire box office takings of The Butterfly Lovers.
Since its formation in 1978, Wang Film Productions has maintained a close partnership with major Hollywood film companies, especially Disney. The company helped present many famous cartoon characters, such as the Pink Panther, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, the Little Mermaid and Stitch, on both the small and big screens. From the founding of Wang Film Productions to the early 1990s, production houses in Taiwan worked mainly for Japanese and American companies, and Taiwan became the world's largest exporter of animated film products.
A New Model
Like so many other industries in Taiwan's evolving economy, producers, after honing their skills by working for foreign brands, longed to put their own stamp on their work. Wang Film Productions has produced its own films since the early 1980s, including one about an indigenous youth from Taiwan's northeastern plain that won the 1999 Golden Horse award for best animated film. In 1997, Rice Film International Co. spent some NT$40 million (US$1.27 million) on the 80-minute Grandma and Her Ghosts, about a Taoist priestess. Having been screened at international film festivals in Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States, the animated movie achieved a rare balance of artistic and commercial success.
Now, with more than three times the financial resources of Grandma and Her Ghosts, Fire Ball is determined to make a bigger splash. "Compared with our previous manufacturing work, the present approach requires subtle initial planning as well as subsequent marketing and distribution," says Ku Li-hung, assistant vice president of the Administrative Department of Wang Film Productions. "It's a completely different business model." His company has moved most of its production facilities for foreign-contract work to China and Thailand. The creative center of the company remains in Taiwan, where staff work on the production of its own feature films. The next movie, scheduled for release in 2007, portrays the real-life adventures of Lin Wang, an elephant that was taken from Burma to China by Chinese Nationalist troops during World War II and finally settled at the Taipei Zoo, where it died at the age of 86 in 2003. "It's one of the most beloved animals in Taiwan," Ku says. Through the film, Ku hopes that "the affection will transcend regional and national boundaries."
Going Native
Such local themes are also seen in the works of Jamar Idea Production Co. Established in 2001, the company consists mainly of business management professionals who try to locate computerized animation studios to develop promising story ideas from, for example, Chinese philosophers and Taiwan's indigenous mythologies. "Local subjects may well contain universal motifs, such as love and life struggles," says Yufu, Jamar's CEO. "Before going to the world, localization is indispensable."
Jamar has just finished production on film versions of two Taiwanese aboriginal myths--the Atayal Shooting the Sun and the Amis Women's Land . Both tales were told in their mother tongues, and one of the voice-actors was so moved to speak the language of her own ancestors that her voice trembled, Yufu recalls.
For animators, producing movies not only revives indigenous storytelling, but also presents a way to expand business potential. Selling such productions for educational and commercial use at home and abroad, Jamar now finds itself sufficiently solvent to transform the indigenous stories into Taiwan's biggest ever 3D animation project for television. Yufu also wants to dramatize the oft-told story of Jheng Cheng-gong, or Koxinga--yet from the viewpoint of the Dutch who were expelled from Taiwan by this piratical Chinese nationalist in the early 1660s.
Vick Wang, CEO of Sofa Studio, also wants to tell Taiwanese people stories about their own cultural traditions, yet probably in a way not immediately recognizable as Taiwanese. His Nobo is to be developed into a 90-minute 3D science fiction film from an animated short within two years. The richly atmospheric piece portrays a badly built little robot chasing a butterfly and making an otherworldly discovery. "Instead of retelling old stories that younger generations may have problems appreciating," Wang says, "we would like to present entirely new content that is interpreted through our own experience and environment so we can retain our own regional flavor."
Building A Brand
A merger of two companies, Sofa also produces visual effects and animation designs for TV commercials, feature films and games for domestic and foreign partners, in order to support their creative ventures. Like Wang and Jamar, the studio recognizes that brand building is a long-term process in which results or profits are not readily visible and risks must be carefully calculated and controlled. Wang points out that while authors have to keep their experimental spirit alive, it is also important to connect that spirit to business acumen so that ideas can become marketable products. He expects to see a larger creative community take shape through the formation of many other animation studios. "Also crucial is the cooperation between animators and other professionals such as businessmen and lawyers," he says.
Just as the animation business can benefit from interdisciplinary cooperation, so too can the education of an animation artist, according to Yu Wei-cheng, director of the Graduate Institute of Animation at Tainan National University of the Arts. "Our students have to familiarize themselves with knowledge of film, fine arts, music and drama," Yu says. He thinks that Taiwanese people need to re-conceive popular culture in order to see the people who create it as professionals and take them seriously. "Many scholars grew up studying hard with little movie or cartoon entertainment," the professor says. "Adults feel ashamed to say they're reading comic strips."
Due to rapidly expanding markets at home and abroad, the business sector is now at least less hesitant to invest in the animation industry. According to the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), such investment has risen more than threefold in recent years to top NT$1.1 billion (US$35 million) in 2004, partly because of the government's promotion.
"The ongoing move from manufacturing capability to intellectual creativity marks a major shift in the business paradigm," says G. J. Huang, director of MOEA's Digital Content Industry Promotion Office. "In the Chinese-speaking world, Taiwanese creativity takes advantage of a more liberal, open society and a cultural tradition that blends indigenous, Chinese, European and Japanese elements." The movie fund of the Government Information Office (GIO) has given priority to animated films, including Fire Ball.
Since 2003, the GIO has sponsored an international animation festival, organized by the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, a nonprofit group soon to be upgraded to a national film center. Along with a professor in National Taiwan University of Arts's Department of Multimedia and Animation Arts, Wang was invited to select local films for this annual event. He says Taiwanese animation artists' growing creativity is due to their easy access to educational resources. He teaches at Taipei National University of the Arts's Graduate School of Arts and Technology and the MOEA-funded Digital Content Institute. "I had nowhere to go when I wanted to learn about animation here in Taiwan," says the Nobo director. "Now the younger generation has a much better learning environment, and I want to help them benefit from it as much as possible."